


Beacon Hills

by ziyazu



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Beacon Hills, F/M, M/M, Rebuilding the Hale House, forest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-09
Updated: 2013-08-09
Packaged: 2017-12-22 21:27:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/918202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ziyazu/pseuds/ziyazu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tucked right into the foothills of the mountains, huddling all alone in a little valley hugged tightly by the wooded fingers of the massive multi-state forest wrapping around it and pulling it close, is Beacon Hills.</p><p>And no one has ever known why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beacon Hills

**Author's Note:**

> This was going to be all horror and blood and trauma, and it just sort of got away from me and became this. I don't even know what this is.

Somewhere in North America, inland from the western coast, more nearly south than north, there is a city. It's a small city – a large town, really. It has a bustling main street, charming leafy parks, and a few quaint bedroom communities that are more like little villages than anything else. The last are scattered here and there, some closer to the highway, some away over by the edge of the mountains.

None of them are large. They all have that small-town feel, good value for money, the artificially slow pace of life that bores children witless but makes their parents smile, assured of their safety, their normality.

Tucked right into the foothills of the mountains, huddling all alone in a little valley hugged tightly by the wooded fingers of the massive multi-state forest wrapping around it and pulling it close, is Beacon Hills.

And no one has ever known why.

*

Sunday morning, blue autumn sky, just a trace of summer's warmth making the air smell sweet with dried grass and late-fading flowers. Orange leaves and cold dew, drying in the weak sunlight. It’s later than it looks, but still early morning.

Early enough, anyway. The dead bodies aren’t even cold.

Lydia finds them; of course she does. Perfectly still, perfectly clean, perfectly untouched yet perfectly drained of blood. Stiles figures out the pattern. Every 50 years, always twins, always the same clearing in the woods.

Scott finds the scent. Cora tracks it down. Derek makes the plan. Isaac baits the trap. Allison lies in wait. Peter smirks and keeps to the sidelines, saying nothing, arms folded as if he knows something. Maybe he does.

Everyone holds their breath.

And this is what they do. Over and over and over again.

*

Never tell a girl you’ve kissed that you think you’re in love with her brother. Or her fiery-haired best friend. Or the tall, quiet one with eyes like Christmas. Or, somehow, all three. It never goes well.

*

Winter becomes summer, because no one remembers spring. Summer lasts and lasts, until it doesn’t, until people die again. Strange people, other people, and one of theirs.

They would all have died to save her, to save the surly almost-stranger they’ve come to love, and none of them could, in the end. She just died. Like it all meant nothing.

No one talks about it. No one talks about _her_. Especially not Stiles.

They bury her by her sister, wrapped in wolfsbane, spiral more symbol than promise. What is there to avenge? Sometimes people just die.

*

More bodies, more patterns, more plans. More lies, more blood, more hurried kisses in the deep, dark woods, where no one can see – but everyone can smell. They’re werewolves after all, and Stiles should know better by now, but he can’t bring himself to care.

He was wrong, anyways. Those eyes, they aren’t like Christmas, they’re like New Year’s Eve. All he wanted was fireworks. He didn’t know how bitter champagne could be, how sharp the frost could bite.

Everyone remembers spring this time. When Isaac leaves in March, he doesn't come back.

*

And on it goes.

Fewer lies now, because more people know. Too many bodies, too few patterns lining up for the Sheriff to ignore. Of course, Stiles knows what the patterns are, and he tells him about them. The Sheriff isn’t stupid, it’s just that nothing in Beacon Hills makes sense without the full moon, without Archaic Latin, without Druids and hunters and the misty edge of magic that lives in the woods beyond the old Hale property.

The Sheriff doesn’t care anymore. He just wants to leave. Stiles doesn’t know how. The people he loves are here. Some of them. A few of them. Those who are left.

When Scott follows Allison to college somewhere out east, there are fewer.

Stiles goes to Berkeley, comes back when he can. He’s not sure why, at first, especially after Lydia flees the haunted hills for the comforts of ancient Oxford and London visits with Jackson. He’s sure, though, that her leaving should have mattered to him more.

Still, he comes back. After another year or two, no one else does. Peter, full of things he knows and won’t say, faded away a long time ago. Stiles doesn’t know where. If Derek does, he doesn’t say.

Stiles is fine with that. By then they both know: it's better with just two.

*

They don’t do much saving anymore. Without a pack presence, evil things don’t find their way to Beacon Hills as much. Or, maybe the runes Lydia left – the ones placed with words and blood and glowing white eyes – maybe they’re doing some good, turning things back at the borders. They know what lurks in the vastness of the woods, far beyond the town lights, but they stick to the Hale section, the top end of the valley and the ridges beyond, and their territory is respected. Derek runs on the full moon, and, when Stiles can be there, he runs too. It’s not pack, but it’s something.

About a year after Lydia leaves, when Stiles comes to stay, he stays in Derek’s room. It was inevitable, really.

Sometimes, when they move together in the moonlight, the house creaking around them, burnt and warped and rotten, Stiles wonders why. Did he always know, somehow?

Derek doesn’t wonder. He just holds on.

*

Stiles always picks and leaves fresh flowers for Cora, every visit. Derek never comes, but her room stays exactly as it was. Sometimes he opens her window to air it out a bit, to let the cold, clean air waft through the way she liked. She loved fresh air from their woods, after so many years away. It settled her down, she said. Made her believe she was really here, at home. Helped her hold onto her anchor. Derek never asked what that was.

Stiles never tells him. He thinks he probably doesn’t need to, the way she used to hang around the house, wandering, fingers drifting across the blackened wood. When he falls through the floor of the upstairs hallway, though, they both know it’s time to rebuild.

By the time it's fully finished, each room torn down and replaced, piece by piece, all by hand, Stiles has a Master’s degree he’ll never use, and Derek has a house he can’t stand to live in. Cora’s gone. Her room is gone. So is everything else – every _one_ else. Why stay?

When Stiles looks around, all he sees are trees.

*

When they leave for the last time, wooded fingers of hilly forest wrapping around the town in the valley behind them, Stiles looks back, and Derek turns to look with him, eyes unblinking before turning back to the road.

“Will you miss it?”

Stiles sighs. “The town? Nah. Plenty of other towns. I’ll miss the woods, though.”

“Our woods.” It doesn’t sound like a question. It is.

Stiles shakes his head, slowly. “I don’t think they were ever really ours.”

*

They weren’t.


End file.
